How Trump united Canada against him and flipped its election upside down

The hostility extends to homegrown Trump supporters such as Canadian hockey legend Wayne Gretzky, who was at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort on election night and attended his inauguration. This week, viral photos from a Toronto liquor store showed labels under Gretzky’s wine range altered to include descriptions such as “weak & backstabbery.”

Former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien said Trump had “united us as never before.”

“I think I will propose him for the Order of Canada,” the country’s highest civilian honor, Chrétien joked as the governing Liberal Party met in Ottawa last weekend to elect a successor to Canada’s leader of almost a decade, the highly unpopular Justin Trudeau.

Experts say the man they overwhelmingly chose, Mark Carney, may be uniquely positioned to push back against Trump’s aggression, with a background in finance and crisis management that includes running the Bank of Canada after the 2008 global financial crisis and the Bank of England during the Brexit process.

Like Trump, Carney, who took office as prime minister on Friday, spent much of his life in the private sector and had never held elected office before becoming his country’s leader.

“He’s been sort of the global elite all his life,” Malloy said. “Normally, that’s not really the route for success for a rookie politician. But these are unusual times.”

‘Resurrected from the dead’

Only a few months ago, the Liberals under Trudeau were looking like “absolute toast” in the next Canadian election, which is required to take place by October of this year, Malloy said.

With his approval rating already at an all-time low, Trudeau’s problems were only compounded by Trump’s tariff threats, which began shortly after he was elected in November.

Internal disagreement over how to respond to those threats created turmoil among the Liberals, with Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s scathing resignation letter in December ultimately forcing Trudeau to announce he would step down.

It seemed almost certain the Liberals would be thrashed in the next election by the Conservative Party, led by Pierre Poilievre.

Poilievre, whose style has been described as “Trump light,” had embraced the populist wing of his party, expressing support for truckers who paralyzed Ottawa with anti-vaccine protests in 2022. Among his supporters was Elon Musk.

Then Trump happened.

On his first day in office, Trump announced a 25% tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico, two of the biggest U.S. trading partners. Those tariffs were paused for a month before going into effect on March 4. Markets immediately began convulsing, and in the days that followed Trump exempted more than a third of goods coming from Canada until April 2.

Trump said he was imposing the tariffs on Canada and Mexico because of their role in the U.S. fentanyl crisis and illegal immigration, mystifying Canadians who point to the U.S. government’s own data showing that Canada is responsible for less than 1% of the fentanyl and undocumented migrants coming across the northern and southern U.S. borders.

Canada is also subject to the 25% U.S. tariff on steel and aluminum imports that took effect globally on Wednesday.

Ottawa responded to those tariffs with its own levies on some $21 billion worth of U.S. goods, and it has also requested a dispute consultation at the World Trade Organization.

Alongside the tariffs, Trump has repeatedly referred to Trudeau as the “governor” of Canada, which with 40 million people has about the same population as California.

Trump’s derision continued on Thursday even as his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, made his first official trip to Canada for a meeting of top diplomats from the Group of 7 industrialized democracies.

“To be honest with you, Canada only works as a state,” Trump said from the Oval Office.

Asked about the issue on Friday, Rubio said it had not come up at the G7 meeting but that there was a “disagreement” between Trump’s position and the position of the Canadian government.

Canadian Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly said she told Rubio that “Canada’s sovereignty is not up to debate.”

“You’re in our country, you respect our people. Period,” she said at a news conference after the meeting in La Malbaie, Quebec.

Fueled by anger at Trump, Canadians have expressed growing support for the Liberals in the upcoming election, almost entirely closing the gap with the Conservatives in a matter of weeks. The Conservatives, which had a lead of almost 20 points a month ago, are now ahead by only 1 percentage point, the Canadian polling firm Nanos said this week.

“The Liberals have basically been resurrected from the dead” because of the crisis Trump created, Malloy said.

As Carney took office on Friday, he rejected Trump’s statehood proposal, saying “America is not Canada.”

“We will never, ever, in any way, shape or form, be part of the United States,” Carney, who turns 60 on Sunday, said after being sworn in.

Though Carney is a novice politician, that could work in his favor, said Maite Gonzalez Latorre, a program assistant at the Atlantic Council in Washington who is from Edmonton, Alberta.

“Mark Carney has experience in the U.K., he has experience in Canada, but he also has private sector experience,” Gonzalez Latorre said, “which I think will give him an advantage, especially when it comes to tariffs and and speaking with Trump directly.”

Carney’s top concerns for the moment, she said, are how to deal with Trump and how the U.S. tariffs are going to affect Canadians. His next moves and Trump’s response to them will influence when Carney calls the election, which could still end in victory for the Conservatives.

As with so many of Trump’s policies and actions, Malloy said, it remains unclear what exactly he is trying to achieve with his antagonism toward Canada.

His actions may have sidelined a potential ally in Poilievre, “who would have been a relatively supportive leader,” Malloy said. And though he took down Trudeau, Trump also revived the fortunes of Trudeau’s party, which is staunchly opposed to his policies.

“What is Mr. Trump’s end game other than chaos? And what’s the point?” Malloy said. “Because so far, he’s only doing things that hurt his interests and the interests of the United States.”

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Stephen Collopy

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